Our Founder’s Story & Reflection on the Women Leading Pharmacy Forward

This week, our Founder & CEO Joy Liu was named to Inc.’s 2026 Female Founders 500, an annual list honoring the most dynamic women business leaders in the United States. The list recognizes founders whose bold ideas, resilience, and execution are shaping the future of their industries.

The recognition is meaningful because of the industry it reflects. Healthcare — and pharmacy in particular — has become one of the most powerful arenas for women to lead.

Plenful’s origin story

The idea for Plenful started with a personal experience. As a patient advocate for a family member navigating a complex treatment journey, Joy saw firsthand how easily care could stall. Not because people weren’t trying, but because the systems behind the care couldn’t keep up.

Paperwork was taking too long. Information was fragmented across systems. Pharmacy teams were buried by manual work and outdated processes. 

Later, while supporting operations across several New England health system specialty pharmacies, she saw the same issues from inside the system. Highly skilled pharmacists, technicians, and claims teams were spending hours each day on administrative processes that had little to do with clinical care. The people responsible for patient care were spending a large part of their time navigating broken workflows. 

That’s the problem we set out to solve when we founded Plenful in 2021. Our mission has been straightforward: moving pharmacy forward through intelligent automation.

‍

Why pharmacy is such a powerful industry for women

One of the things that makes pharmacy unique is the leadership pipeline it creates for women. In the 1960s, only 14% of pharmacists were women. Today, women represent nearly 70% of the pharmacist workforce in the United States, one of the most dramatic gender shifts of any clinical profession. Within that community, women hold 59% of pharmacy management positions, a number that has continued to rise over the last decade.

Every day we work alongside Chief Pharmacy Officers, pharmacy directors, patient support leaders, and 340B leaders who are transforming how care is delivered inside health systems. These leaders are navigating enormous complexity — new regulatory models, reimbursement shifts, compliance pressures, and labor shortages — while still making sure patients get the medications they need.

‍

Celebrating the women moving pharmacy forward

Seeing Joy receive recognition like the Inc. Female Founders 500 is an honor. What matters even more is the community we work alongside every day across health system pharmacies — the female leaders reimagining pharmacy’s seat at the table within major health systems who refuse to accept outdated workflows and status quo processes.

If you’re interested in connecting, please find Joy on LinkedIn or request a demo to learn more about how Plenful supports pharmacy teams across 340B compliance and optimization, financial reconciliation in evolving regulatory environments, and intake authorization workflows.